Pagan Spring: A Mystery (A Max Tudor Novel)

by Malliet, G. M.

  Suzanna gave this some thought.

  “Moldering, then.”

  “Is that a word?”

  “Yes. It means disintegrating,” Adam said. “I don’t quite think that’s the word you want in this instance.”

  And so it went, throughout the long evening, a perfect illustration of why so little actual writing got done in the Writers’ Square.

  * * *

  “‘And on winter nights,’” Adam read, “‘when the wind is heard in the trees, it is her voice calling for her lover, whom in life she darest not name.’”

  They were all nicely settled into the session now, coffee cups or wineglasses full, and eyes bright, in the case of Suzanna and Frank, like owls on the alert for stray field mice or, in Frank’s case, the stray comma. Adam flipped over another page of his pad and cleared his throat. The brown cardigan he wore in the shop as a sort of dust jacket had been replaced, in deference to the cool weather and the bookish occasion, with a fisherman’s knit jumper and a wool scarf looped artfully around his neck. In summer, it would be a Hawaiian shirt, his trousers held up with striped braces. Befitting his profession, Adam had a domed Shakespearean forehead, basset-hound eyes, and a quiet, scholarly manner. He had been amicably divorced for many years and seemed untouched by the general downturn in the book trade. He went to book sales and had uncovered a few gems, relying on instinct as much as knowledge. He sold mostly through an online presence these days, but he was a book lover to his fingertips and too often couldn’t bear to part with his signed treasures.

  Adam had set aside the other novel he’d been writing for years, having given up on a creation in which the literary world had shown either no interest or an active dislike. It had been a modern novel, experimental—so much so as to be incomprehensible. Suzanna described it as the written equivalent of a whistle only dogs could hear. Now he was writing something “popular,” and was thinking of calling it A Death in Nunswood.

  “‘And now she lives the life beyond the veil, the veil we darest not pierce.’” Adjusting his rimless spectacles, Adam peered about the group, to see how they were taking this. “Future generations have called the spot haunted, and on All Hallows’ Eve, few darest approach Nunswood at night.”

  It was all too much for Suzanna. From where she sat on the overstuffed chintz-covered sofa, feet tucked beneath her, she drawled, “Adam, darest I interrupt you to ask whether darest is a word?” She turned inquiringly toward Frank, their resident pedant. “I don’t think darest is a word, do you?”

  Frank pulled thoughtfully at his beard. “It was a word at one time.”

  “So was codpiece,” said Suzanna. “Unless we’re writing a historical novel about the Cultural Revolution of Henry the Eighth, I don’t think we need to revive the worst of the old language.”

  “It is Poetry,” said Adam. The uppercase P was clearly implied. “I am using Poetic License.” Ditto the L.

  “It’s a word if it has letters,” said Frank. Suzanna looked at him, for once not quite knowing what to say.

  “DKNY has letters,” said Elka Garth doubtfully. Elka was writing a cookbook, a collection of baking recipes. She was hamstrung by the fact that her methods and measurements were intuitive, honed over years of operating the Cavalier Tea Room. She could eyeball with scientific precision how much flour to pour into the “big chipped yellow bowl,” for example, but she had had trouble translating this into grams.

  “Hmm,” said Frank and Suzanna together.

  “Let Adam go on,” suggested Elka. “I like this story.”

  Adam, a gentle soul, his petals easily crushed, looked gratefully at Elka, his brown eyes magnified by the thick lenses of his glasses.

  “Go on,” said Suzanna, but in a low voice. “It might cure my insomnia.”

  “Is there really a magical spring where a murder was committed?” asked Elka. “Formed at the spot where the nun’s blood was shed?”

  “That depends on who you darest ask,” replied Suzanna.

  “Whom,” corrected Frank automatically.

  “What?” said Suzanna.

  “That depends on whom you ask,” said Frank.

  “Really?” Suzanna managed to pack quite a bit of feeling into the two syllables. “Then I’ll ask the right person next time,” she said. “And the spring,” she continued, turning away from Frank, the Grammar Czar, “has been around since anyone can remember. It used to be called ‘Blood Spring.’ Still is, by some of the village wrinklies. Its healing properties have been well known for centuries.”

  “Absolutely,” said Elka.

  Suzanna nodded. “It’s not talked about much—they want to keep the tourists away.” “They” were understood to be the members of the Nether Monkslip Parish Council. “When I first came to Nether Monkslip, I took out a book on the subject from the perambulating library. And, of course, Awena knows all about it.”

  “Thank you, Elka and Suzanna,” said Adam. “If I may I’ll insert a bit of background here, since some of us at least seem to be interested. Monks from the old abbey at some point took over the pagan spring, which had been there, as Suzanna says, forever—adopting and caring for it. Interestingly, they didn’t choose to obliterate the pagan symbols they found scattered about, often carved into the stone menhirs. They incorporated them with their Christian symbols.”

  “That was broad-minded of them,” said Elka.

  Adam nodded. “This live-and-let-live attitude persisted until the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries. The spring was forgotten. It was rumored that when Henry’s men came to destroy the “popish” symbols, a monk from the nearby abbey, on the orders of the abbot, buried some of the monastery’s treasure at the spring.”

  “Very good idea, that,” said Elka.

  “I’m thinking of turning the story into a screenplay,” Adam said.

  “Oh!” said Elka, to whom screenplay writing was a dark art, like necromancy. “Do you know how to write a screenplay? Don’t you have to format it and things?”

  “Well, it’s just dialogue, really. Beckettian. Brief, punchy sentences. You know.”

  “What’s the title?”

  “Wait for Spring.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  “I mean that’s the title.”

  Frank said, “I thought of turning Wherefore Nether Monkslip into a screenplay.” Wherefore Nether Monkslip, or WNM as it was called by those who felt they’d read or heard about it at least a thousand times, was Frank’s contribution to the folklore of the region. Originally, it had debuted in pamphlet form. Frank had typed every word in a slow hunt and peck at his old typewriter and then had had photocopies made at the stationers in Monkslip-super-Mare, complete with his later insertions and crossings-out. Later, he’d splurged, dipping into his savings to have the pamphlet published by a vanity press. (That he had not consulted his wife, Lucie, over this decision was still a hot topic in the Cuthbert household.) Copies were available for purchase, as he liked to say, everywhere—that is, at the Hidden Fox pub and, more recently, at the little shop attached to the post office. He had in the meantime secured another blurb for the back cover (to add to the one from Jack Ralston-Fifle, Historian and Author), this time from “Literature Authority Ivor Blattfallen.” It read, in total, “Frank Cuthbert’s finest effort to date,” which neatly managed to sidestep several issues, including the fact that it was Frank’s only effort to date.

  “I thought Wherefore Nether Monkslip was more a rambler’s guide to the area,” said Suzanna.

  “Oh, I’ve much expanded it beyond the early drafts. I’ve added characters, you see, to flesh the whole thing out.”

  “Ah,” said Suzanna.

  “I’ve just been reworking chapter sixty-seven,” said Frank. “I’ll read a few paragraphs aloud, shall I?”

  Suzanna listened patiently—as patiently as Suzanna could, like someone waiting for the results of urgently commissioned chest X-rays or an autopsy report—and finally broke in to say, “Frank, the clichés! Why
don’t you just have him twirl his mustache while you’re at it?”

  “You feel the character is a cliché, Suzanna?” Frank fairly bristled with tetchy annoyance: It was as though the hairs in his beard stood on end. Frank, for all his writerly optimism, occasionally succumbed to moments of self-doubt. Sadie awoke and stood beside him, a look of anxiety on her face.

  “Is that what you’re implying?” Frank demanded.

  “I imply nothing. I clearly state that you’re hamming it up too much. Do you want my help getting published or don’t you?” Suzanna, with her tenuous and fading connections to the world of London publishing, frequently adopted this sort of attitude, best described as “take it or leave it.” Only Suzanna emerged unscathed from the resulting spats, her wanton disregard for opposing opinions intact. She was one of those lucky people born without filters; for the most part, she simply didn’t care what others thought.

  “I’m thinking I might put an excerpt on the Internet,” Frank told the others, gazing darkly ahead and avoiding Suzanna’s eyes.

  “Oh!” Elka was enthusiastic. She sold her marzipan creations over the Web—tiny, exquisitely crafted animals and flowers—but had hired a firm to build her Web site and process orders. How they did this was, to her, an even darker art than scriptwriting. “Do you know how to Webmaster?”

  “It’s child’s play. In fact, my grandchild has offered to help me.”

  Elka turned to Suzanna. “How’s your book coming along, then?” Suzanna, when last heard from, had been writing what might politely be called a romance with erogenous interludes.

  “Swimmingly. Have a look.” Suzanna handed her a notebook with a cardboard cover of a vivid paisley design of pinks and greens.

  Elka read a few pages in silence, then put down the notebook, as if its pages might ignite in her hands.

  “I’ve never seen our vicar surge or pulse, now that I come to think of it,” she said at last. “Max just … well, he’s just there. He is what he is.”

  “Who said I’m writing about Max?”

  “Puh-leeze. ‘Black hair falling rakishly over one gray eye, and a devilish grin’?”

  “Yes, so? That describes hundreds of men.”

  “‘A devilish grin that belied a…’”—she reached for the line again—“‘a compassionate and tender nature’? And what happened to his other eye, by the way?”

  “Dozens of men,” insisted Suzanna. “I can fix that bit about the eye.”

  Adam, who had left momentarily to replenish his coffee cup, rejoined them. Elka told him, “I think Suzanna may have discovered a new romance novel subgenre. Vicar porn.”

  “Really,” said Adam. “I’m not sure if it’s all that new. Anyway, I thought you were writing your memoirs?”

  “I can do both. It’s all the same thing, when you really think about it, isn’t it? I’ve already had my author photo taken. So I’m ready, whenever the iron’s hot.”

  “You just have to finish writing the book.”

  “Goes without saying.” She waved a manicured hand, as if casting a spell over the pages in her notebook, making them write themselves. “Won’t take long.”

  “I worked on my book for years, as you know,” said Adam. “Years.”

  She might not have heard, for Suzanna was not open to suggestions that anything about this book-writing process might be time-consuming or labor-intensive. “Now all that’s needed is a prominent socialite to host my book launch,” she said.

  “Apart from having an actual book to launch, you mean?” said Frank.

  “Nether Monkslip doesn’t have a socialite,” said Elka, having mentally surveyed the field of potential candidates. “Prominent or otherwise.”

  “That is true,” said Suzanna. “There is a gaping void in our socialite department. Excepting the folk at Totleigh Hall when they’re about, which they hardly ever seem to be.”

  “I’m thinking of writing a memoir next,” said Frank. “If the book doesn’t take off. It’s funny, but I’m still not hearing back from any of the agents I mailed it to.” They were all thinking that the market for Frank’s memoirs would be approximately five people. Frank came from quite a small family.

  “Did you hear anything back from Thaddeus Bottle?” Elka asked Frank.

  “No,” said Frank shortly. Frank had sent a copy of his book to the playwright and actor on his arrival in Nether Monkslip, along with a polite request that he do a guest appearance at the Writers’ Square. The reply, when it came, had been scathing.

  “You might try approaching him again,” said Elka tentatively.

  “Let me think about it.”

  “It’s just that I—”

  “Okay, I’ve thought about it. And the answer is no.”

  “I think you’re wise,” said Adam, who may have been reminded of a recent visit by the author (the semifamous author, Adam corrected himself) and how he’d tried to browbeat Adam into stocking copies of his plays. No use telling the man scripts didn’t sell. What a pompous know-it-all.

  “I gave Thaddeus a summary of my book to read,” Adam told them. “He glanced at it and said, ‘I have not read anything so not worth reading than this in a long time.’”

  They all made shocked, gasping sounds. “Oh, Adam. How horrible for you. And how horrible of him,” said Elka.

  Adam shrugged. “S’okay. Maybe he’s right.”

  “I don’t see,” said Elka, “how anyone so lacking in taste about everything else could be right about this. I mean, just look at that house of his.”

  They all loyally nodded their heads.

  A small grin lifted the corners of Adam’s mouth. Could Elka be right?

  “She’s absolutely right,” Suzanna assured him. “He always struck me as an idiot with a first-class mind, if you follow. Not precisely dim, but that ego gets in the way. And that emaciated stick of a wife, Melinda. What is up with those two?”

  Elka agreed. “Pay absolutely no attention. If I were you, I’d be more worried he’s over there trying to remember what he read so he can steal it from you.”

  “Do you really think…” Adam began, alarmed. Clearly this possibility had not occurred to him.

  Frank nodded. “Look, no one is crazy about that guy. He seems to have moved here just to lord it over all of us peons. And this just proves it. I doubt he even read your summary. He just pretended to.”

  Now Adam was beaming. What good friends he had. Oh, they might demolish one another’s work at times, but they never would allow anyone else to do the same. Thaddeus had unknowingly just solidified his position as an outsider doomed to remain outside. It took long enough for a newcomer to be accepted into the fold in Nether Monkslip. With Thaddeus, a long time might mean forever.

  “How do you spell playwright?” asked Elka, who had volunteered to take minutes of these meetings. “P-l-a-y-w-r-i-t-e?” It was felt that what they were doing in the Writers’ Square was of such importance to future generations, it needed to be documented.

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you?” said Suzanna. “But I’m not certain we need to memorialize Mr. Thaddeus Bottle.”

  * * *

  “So, our next meeting … let me see…” And here Frank pulled a calendar from the stack of papers before him. “Yes, we’re on the calendar for April nineteenth.” Frank had assumed a leadership role although, in theory, and in keeping with the stated avant gardeness of the group, its manifesto was that “all were equal, all voices to be heard” (Frank Cuthbert, Minutes of the Writers’ Square—Founding Meeting).

  Suzanna held up her hand. She had assumed a recently vacated position in the role of Village Bossypants, and now reigned unchallenged, the capo di tutti capi of the Women’s Institute. She had taken on this mantle with a great deal of style and verve, and reveled in a role that provided an outlet for her otherwise-thwarted ambitions. Still, things were not as bad as what the villagers had experienced with her predecessor, and no one could question that Suzanna had brought new life to the sessions. Most recentl
y, the Women’s Institute had provided a “Know Your Bits” evening, a feminist offering boycotted by Miss Pitchford and several others. The topic had, of course, been Suzanna’s idea.

  “Let me stop you right there,” she said now. “We’ve got a conflict. The Women’s Institute meets that night instead of the usual. We have a guest speaker—the chef from the new restaurant.” She picked up a copy of Glossamer Living magazine and began thumbing through its thick, shiny pages. “All of you did see the article about the White Bean?”

  The talk of the village for weeks had been the opening of the new restaurant—an establishment featuring organic, local-sourced, and sustainable food. The place had received significant attention in the local-and-beyond press. It was, they said, “ecofriendly,” having been renovated with reclaimed and recycled materials by an uber-trendy outfit called ARchiTecture (+Y+) DEsign.

  “We’re lucky to get Fabio as a speaker,” said Suzanna. “Fortunately, I grabbed him and his brother before the restaurant took off and they got so busy.”

  “You are speaking metaphorically, of course,” said Frank with feigned innocence. “What is the brother’s name? I keep forgetting.”

  “I think it’s Umberto,” Suzanna replied vaguely. She sighed as deeply as her undergarments would allow. Suzanna had sworn off tummy tamers, which she likened to the whalebone corset, when Awena had “swooped in and stolen Max,” although the ban hadn’t lasted once she’d set eyes on Umberto, also known as Grimaldi the Elder. She had last night asked her brother Bruce if she could borrow a scalpel.

  “I don’t see how else I’m going to get out of this thing. I might need the Jaws of Life.”

  “That is really bad for your circulation, you know,” Bruce Winship had said.

  “So is spinsterhood.”

  Leaning over with difficulty to pat Sadie, Suzanna said, “Fabio is married,” hoping to deflect attention from the fact it was the elder of the Grimaldis she had set her sights on. “Completely off-limits as far as I’m concerned. Anyway, we’ll have to move the Writers’ Square meeting by a few days. Thursday’s the only day he was available.” She flipped through her mobile phone’s calendar with brisk efficiency, as if masterminding an invasion. “Let’s see…”